Minnesota's Pay Transparency Law Tells Employers What to Publish and Says Nothing About What Happens If They Don't

Minnesota’s pay transparency statute, Minn. Stat. § 181.173, is two subdivisions long. The first defines three terms. The second states the duty: publish a starting salary range and a general description of the benefits. There is no third subdivision. There is no penalty, no civil action, no administrative order, no poster, no recordkeeping requirement, and no anti-retaliation clause.

That is not an oversight the reader should assume away. The act that created § 181.173 — 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110 — also amended Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4, the list of employment statutes the Commissioner of Labor and Industry may order an employer to comply with. That amendment added two sections to the list. Neither was § 181.173. The legislature edited the enforcement list in the same chapter of session law in which it wrote the new obligation, and did not put the new obligation on the list.

The practical consequence is that the compliance question for an employer and the leverage question for an employee are different questions with different answers. The duty is real and it is easy to state. The remedy is not obvious, and the most plausible one runs through the Attorney General rather than through the Department of Labor and Industry or through a private plaintiff.

What does § 181.173 actually require in a job posting?

Two things, in every posting, for every opening. Subdivision 2 states them:

(a) An employer must disclose in each posting for each job opening with the employer the starting salary range, and a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation, including but not limited to any health or retirement benefits, to be offered to a hired job applicant.

(b) An employer that does not plan to offer a salary range for a position must list a fixed pay rate. A salary range may not be open ended.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 2.

Three drafting choices in that language matter.

First, the disclosure is of the starting salary range — not the full band for the classification, not what a tenured incumbent earns. Subdivision 1(d) defines the term:

“Salary range” means the minimum and maximum annual salary or hourly range of compensation, based on the employer’s good faith estimate, for a job opportunity of the employer at the time of the posting of an advertisement for such opportunity.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(d). The estimate is measured “at the time of the posting,” and the standard is good faith. A range that turns out to be wrong because the market moved is not the same thing as a range that was never a good-faith estimate when it was published.

Second, the benefits disclosure is not limited to health and retirement. The statute requires “a general description of all of the benefits and other compensation,” with health and retirement given only as examples (“including but not limited to”). Bonus eligibility, commission structure, equity, and paid leave are “other compensation” or “benefits” by any ordinary reading. What the statute asks for is a general description — not a plan document, not a summary plan description, not dollar values.

Third, “A salary range may not be open ended” is a flat prohibition, and subdivision 2(b) supplies the alternative: if the employer does not plan to offer a range at all, it lists a fixed pay rate. There is no third option. “$70,000 and up,” “DOE,” “competitive,” and “$50,000–$180,000” for a single defined role are the postings that create exposure — the last one because a range that spans the entire wage structure of a company is not a good-faith estimate of the minimum and maximum for that job opportunity.

Which employers are covered — and is it 30 employees, or 30 employees in Minnesota?

In Minnesota. This is the definition most often paraphrased into something the statute does not say:

“Employer” means a person or entity that employs 30 or more employees at one or more sites in Minnesota and includes an individual, corporation, partnership, association, nonprofit organization, group of persons, state, county, town, city, school district, or other governmental subdivision.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(b).

The count is of employees at Minnesota sites. A national employer with 6,000 employees and eleven of them working out of a Bloomington office is not, by the text, an “employer” under this section. Conversely, a Minnesota-only company with 30 employees spread across four small locations is covered, because the statute says “at one or more sites.”

Note also what the definition sweeps in on the public side: the state itself, counties, towns, cities, school districts, and “other governmental subdivision.” Public employers in Minnesota are subject to § 181.173 by its own terms.

What the definition does not contain is a measuring period. Employment statutes commonly count heads over a stated window — a number of employees maintained for some number of working days or calendar weeks. Section 181.173 says only “employs 30 or more employees.” An employer whose headcount crosses 30 mid-year, or oscillates around it seasonally, has no statutory instruction about when the duty attaches or whether it ever detaches.

What counts as a “posting”?

Broader than a job board listing, and narrower than every hiring communication:

“Posting” means any solicitation intended to recruit job applicants for a specific available position, including recruitment done directly by an employer or indirectly through a third party, and includes any postings made electronically or via printed hard copy, that includes qualifications for desired applicants.

Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(c).

Two features do real work.

The third-party clause means an employer cannot outsource the problem to a staffing agency or a recruiter. If the recruiter’s listing is a solicitation intended to recruit applicants for a specific available position with the employer, it is a “posting.”

The trailing clause — “that includes qualifications for desired applicants” — is a limiter, and it is the least-discussed words in the section. A solicitation that states no qualifications arguably falls outside the definition. A “Now hiring, apply within” card in a window, or a general “we’re always looking for good people” page with no role and no qualifications, is not a solicitation “for a specific available position” that “includes qualifications.” Employers should not build a compliance strategy on that clause — but a plaintiff should know it exists before treating every recruiting communication as a covered posting.

The definition is also silent on where the job is. It defines the employer by reference to Minnesota sites; it does not say the advertised position must be located in Minnesota, and it does not say the posting must be viewable in Minnesota. For a covered employer advertising a fully remote position open to applicants anywhere, the statute supplies no geographic carve-out on the face of the text. No reported Minnesota decision construing § 181.173 has issued, and the Department of Labor and Industry has not been given rulemaking authority over the section, so this is currently a question with a text and no gloss.

When did it take effect?

January 1, 2025 — and that date comes from the session law, not from the statutory default.

Section 181.173 was enacted as 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 7, § 2, and that section carries its own effective-date clause: “This section is effective January 1, 2025.” Note what the clause does not say. When the same legislature enacted the captive-audience statute the year before, it wrote “This section is effective August 1, 2023, and applies to causes of action accruing on or after that date.” 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 53, art. 11, § 25. Section 181.173 has no comparable application clause — which is unsurprising, because it creates no cause of action for the clause to attach to.

What happens to an employer that ignores it?

This is where the section becomes genuinely unusual, and it is worth walking the enforcement architecture of chapter 181 rather than assuming a remedy exists.

The private-action statute does not list it. Minn. Stat. § 181.171, subd. 1, is the provision that lets “[a] person” bring a civil action “directly to district court” for violations of certain chapter 181 sections, with mandatory costs and attorney fees under subdivision 3. It enumerates the sections it covers: §§ 181.02, 181.03, 181.031, 181.032, 181.08, 181.09, 181.10, 181.101, 181.11, 181.13, 181.14, 181.145, 181.15, 181.722, and 181.723. Section 181.173 is not among them.

The commissioner’s compliance-order statute does not list it. Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4, enumerates the statutes the commissioner may order an employer to comply with, and subdivision 5 lets the commissioner sue to enforce those orders. Section 181.173 does not appear in the list. As noted at the top, 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 2, § 3 amended that very list — inserting §§ 181.10 and 181.64 — five articles before the same chapter created § 181.173.

The criminal penalty does not reach the substantive violation. Minn. Stat. § 177.32, subd. 1, makes it a misdemeanor to hinder or delay the commissioner in performing duties under “sections 177.21 to 177.435, 181.01 to 181.723,” to refuse the commissioner entry, to falsify records, and — clause (9) — to “otherwise violate[] any provision of sections 177.21 to 177.44.” Clause (9)’s catchall stops at § 177.44. A pay-transparency violation is not a crime under it.

What is left is the Attorney General. Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 provides, in a single sentence:

In addition to the enforcement of this chapter by the department, the attorney general may enforce this chapter under section 8.31.

Section 181.173 sits inside chapter 181. On the face of § 181.1721, the Attorney General may enforce it using the § 8.31 machinery: the civil investigative demand under § 8.31, subd. 2; injunctive relief and a civil penalty “in an amount to be determined by the court, not in excess of $25,000” under subd. 3; and an assurance of discontinuance under subd. 2b.

This is not a speculative reading. The Eighth Circuit applied exactly this framework to a different chapter 181 statute — Minnesota’s captive-audience law — in Minnesota Chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors v. Ellison, No. 24-3116 (8th Cir. Sept. 3, 2025). Holding that the Commissioner of Labor and Industry was not a proper defendant, the court wrote: “the Act is not one of the enumerated sections of labor law with which the Legislature gave the Commissioner the power to ‘requir[e] an employer to comply’ and to ‘bring an action in the district court . . . to enforce or require compliance.’ Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subds. 4, 5.” Slip op. at 6–7. Of the Attorney General, the same opinion said: “There is no dispute that he has power to enforce the Act, see Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 . . . .” Slip op. at 7.

The reasoning transfers cleanly. Section 181.173, like § 181.531, is a chapter 181 obligation that the legislature declined to place on the § 177.27, subd. 4 list. The Eighth Circuit treated that list as an exclusive enumeration and treated § 181.1721 as the Attorney General’s — not the commissioner’s — grant.

Can a job applicant sue under § 8.31, subd. 3a?

That is the open question, and it deserves a straight answer about its openness rather than a confident one either way.

Minnesota’s private attorney general provision reads:

In addition to the remedies otherwise provided by law, any person injured by a violation of any of the laws referred to in subdivision 1 may bring a civil action and recover damages, together with costs and disbursements, including costs of investigation and reasonable attorney’s fees, and receive other equitable relief as determined by the court.

Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 3a. We have written separately about how § 8.31 works and who can use it.

The textual difficulty is the phrase “the laws referred to in subdivision 1.” Subdivision 1 directs the Attorney General to investigate “violations of the law of this state respecting unfair, discriminatory, and other unlawful practices in business, commerce, or trade,” then names a list of acts “specifically, but not exclusively.” Chapter 181 is not on that list. Section 181.1721 supplies the Attorney General’s authority over chapter 181 by cross-reference — but subdivision 3a keys the private remedy to subdivision 1’s laws, not to everything the Attorney General is authorized to enforce.

Two further limits sit on top of that. In Ly v. Nystrom, 615 N.W.2d 302 (Minn. 2000), the Minnesota Supreme Court held: “the Private AG Statute applies only to those claimants who demonstrate that their cause of action benefits the public.” Id. at 314. The Court grounded that limit in the scope of the Attorney General’s own authority, reasoning that the reach of the private statute can be no broader than the source of the authority it borrows — the Attorney General’s, whose duty is to protect public rather than individual interests. Id. at 313–14. A single applicant’s grievance about one posting is close to the paradigm the public-benefit requirement was written to screen out; Ly itself involved a one-on-one transaction and the Court held the statute did not reach it. And a § 8.31, subd. 3a plaintiff must show injury; the damages theory for reading a posting that omitted a salary range is not self-evident.

The honest statement of the law is this: an applicant has a colorable but untested argument, and it will rise or fall on the public-benefit showing and on injury. Nobody should be told it is settled.

The legislature knows how to write a remedy into chapter 181

The contrast inside the same chapter is what makes the omission look deliberate rather than accidental.

Each of the first three was drafted by a legislature that knew how to attach consequences. The captive-audience statute in the third row — discussed in detail in our companion piece on Minnesota’s ban on mandatory political and religious meetings — was enacted in 2023 with a fee-shifting private action written directly into it. Section 181.173, passed the following year by the same body, has none.

What § 181.173 does not require

Enumerating the absent obligations is useful, because compliance vendors sometimes sell them anyway:

• No poster. Compare § 181.531, subd. 3, which requires the commissioner to develop a poster and the employer to post it.
• No recordkeeping. The section imposes no duty to retain postings, salary-range calculations, or good-faith-estimate documentation.
• No applicant notice. Nothing requires the employer to give a covered applicant a copy of the range on request, or to explain a deviation between the posted range and the offer.
• No anti-retaliation clause. An applicant or employee who complains about a noncompliant posting is not protected by § 181.173. Protection would have to come from somewhere else — the Whistleblower Act, § 181.932, if the complaint reports a suspected violation of law, or the wage disclosure protections of § 181.172 if the conduct is disclosure of the employee’s own wages.
• No rulemaking authority. The section gives no agency power to issue rules interpreting it.
• No cap on the width of a range, other than the good-faith-estimate standard and the prohibition on open-ended ranges.

So why should an employer comply?

Because the salary range in a posting is evidence in every case that follows, and because non-compliance is more expensive than compliance in ways that never appear in § 181.173.

A posted range is a written, contemporaneous, employer-authored statement of what a job is worth. In a Minnesota Equal Pay for Equal Work claim under § 181.67 — which turns on whether employees of opposite sexes are paid differently “for equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility” — or in a negotiation over a severance, the posting is a document the employer wrote and cannot un-write. An employer whose posted range for a role is $85,000–$105,000 and whose offer to one demographic group clusters at the bottom has created the comparison itself.

The same logic runs the other way for applicants and employees. The posting is the single most useful document an applicant can preserve, and it is often gone from the internet within weeks. Screenshot it, with the URL and date visible, before the offer conversation begins — the same discipline that makes the personnel record request under §§ 181.960–181.966 valuable is what makes a preserved posting valuable.

And an employer’s exposure is not measured only by § 181.173. The Attorney General’s § 8.31 authority over chapter 181 comes with a civil investigative demand power that reaches far past the posting itself. As the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decisions in the Madison Equities litigation illustrate, a CID issued under § 8.31, subd. 2 can produce years of collateral litigation over its scope before any enforcement action is filed. An employer that would rather not explain its compensation structure under oath has a cheap way to avoid the conversation: publish the range.

Where this leaves the two sides

For employees and applicants: § 181.173 gives you information, not a lawsuit. Treat the posting as evidence, not as a claim. If the real grievance is pay disparity, the claim lives in § 181.67 and its remedy in § 181.68 — one year of unpaid wages, discretionary exemplary damages, and mandatory attorney fees — not in § 181.173. If the real grievance is that the employer forbade you to discuss your own pay, the claim lives in § 181.172, which does have a private action and is on the commissioner’s compliance-order list. If the employer promised one thing to get you to move and paid another, look at § 181.64, and if the dispute is over post-termination commissions, look at § 181.145.

For employers: the compliance cost is a sentence in a template. The risk of skipping it is not a § 181.173 penalty — there isn’t one — but an Attorney General inquiry under § 181.1721 and § 8.31 that will not confine itself to job postings, and a document trail in which the company declined to state what it pays.

Madgett Law, LLC represents Minnesota employees in wage, commission, retaliation, and employment-statute claims, and advises small Minnesota businesses on employment-practices compliance. If you are an applicant or employee trying to work out whether a posting, an offer, or a pay decision gives you a claim — or an employer trying to work out what chapter 181 actually obligates you to do — call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.

Sources: Minn. Stat. § 181.173, subd. 1(b) (definition of “employer,” 30 employees at Minnesota sites, inclusion of governmental subdivisions), subd. 1(c) (definition of “posting,” third-party recruitment, electronic and printed form, qualifications limiter), subd. 1(d) (definition of “salary range,” minimum and maximum, good-faith estimate at time of posting), subd. 2(a) (starting salary range and general description of all benefits and other compensation), subd. 2(b) (fixed pay rate alternative; no open-ended range), revisor.mn.gov. 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 110, art. 7, § 2 (enactment of § 181.173; effective-date clause “This section is effective January 1, 2025”); art. 2, § 3 (amendment of Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4, adding §§ 181.10 and 181.64 to the compliance-order list), revisor.mn.gov session laws. 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 53, art. 11, § 25 (enactment of § 181.531; effective-date and accrual clause), revisor.mn.gov session laws. Minn. Stat. § 181.171, subd. 1 (enumerated sections for direct district court action), subd. 3 (mandatory attorney fees). Minn. Stat. § 177.27, subd. 4 (compliance orders; enumerated sections), subd. 5 (commissioner’s civil actions). Minn. Stat. § 177.32, subd. 1(1), (9) (misdemeanor; scope of catchall). Minn. Stat. § 181.1721 (attorney general enforcement of chapter 181 under § 8.31). Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 1 (investigative mandate and enumerated acts), subd. 2 (civil investigative demand), subd. 2b (assurance of discontinuance), subd. 3 (injunctive relief; civil penalty up to $25,000), subd. 3a (private remedies; damages, costs of investigation, attorney fees). Minn. Stat. § 181.67, subd. 1 (equal pay prohibition); § 181.68, subds. 1–2 (right of action, exemplary damages, attorney fees); § 181.70 (misdemeanor). Minn. Stat. § 181.172(a), (d), (e) (wage disclosure protection and private action). Minn. Stat. § 181.531, subd. 2 (captive-audience private action, 90 days, fees), subd. 3 (poster). Minnesota Chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors v. Ellison, No. 24-3116, slip op. at 6–7 (8th Cir. Sept. 3, 2025) (Commissioner not an Ex parte Young defendant because the statute is not among the § 177.27, subd. 4 enumerated sections; Attorney General’s power under § 181.1721 undisputed), official opinion PDF at ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov. Ly v. Nystrom, 615 N.W.2d 302, 314 (Minn. 2000) (public-benefit requirement for Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 3a claims), Caselaw Access Project. State of Minnesota Office of the Attorney General v. Madison Equities, Inc., No. A24-0107 (Minn. Jan. 7, 2026) (§ 8.31 investigative mandate, CID practice, and tolling), Minnesota Judicial Branch slip opinion. Minnesota CareerForce (Department of Employment and Economic Development), “Compensation and Benefits” (agency summary of the January 1, 2025 effective date), careerforce.mn.gov.

This article is general legal information about Minnesota law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and it does not promise or imply any particular outcome. Statutes change and the application of any statute depends on facts that are not described here.